Chapter 8

We Appear to Have a Problem

“Patience is the best remedy for every trouble.”
Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254–184 BC)

 

Ask anyone at Hope for Wildlife’s Seaforth rehabilitation centre: the Roman playwright would never have written that if he had met Lucifer. Patience has had no effect whatsoever on getting this troublesome raccoon free and far away. There seems to be no explanation for his problem, other than calling it, and him, an anomaly.

Lucifer

The summer of 2009 was a rough one at Hope for Wildlife. An outbreak of panleukopenia, a rapid and deadly viral disease also known as feline distemper, was running amok in the raccoon pens, decimating that spring’s masked orphans and pressing their small on-site animal hospital into double service as both a triage centre and isolation ward. When a phone call came from Truro about more raccoon orphans, Swinimer was already caught between a dozen disasters and a handful of catastrophes, and later acknowledged she likely didn’t give it her full attention. What she missed was the announcement that a soon-to-be legendary troublemaker was about to arrive.

“The gentleman said he had two orphaned baby raccoons, and both were without hair,” Swinimer remembered. “I didn’t think too much about it. It was really busy that day, and I get so many strange phone calls. I told him to bring them in, but I was just run off my feet and was really, really tired, and Nicole [Payne] happened to be here. I asked her to look after him when he arrived.”

The man was there quickly with his two sons and a pet carrier. They had found the animals in their backyard and left for Seaforth as soon as he got off the phone with Swinimer. No one considered their haste in any way unusual, perhaps because everyone was too busy to really think about it, so Payne took them on a tour of the Hope for Wildlife facility and then they were gone. The carrier was taken to the hospital to have its contents assessed, vaccinated, and fed. Payne was an experienced wildlife rehab worker, but was in for a shock. When she opened the pet carrier, inside were two young raccoons with perfectly normal fur on their heads and tails, even down to the trademark mask and stripes. The rest of each body, however, was naked.

“They were quite large and well developed, probably close to two months old,” she said, “totally normal raccoons for that age, except for the fact that they were almost completely hairless. They had by far the least amount of fur I had ever seen on a raccoon.”

Not only were they hairless, they were also very bad-tempered, especially the one she later named Lucifer. Payne knew trouble when she saw it, and realized the arrivals would only add to the crushing weight of existing raccoon problems. She started an emergency search for her boss, carrying with her the news that in the midst of an epidemic that was killing dozens of their raccoons every week, two new ones with hairless bodies had just been deposited on them.

Swinimer later admitted she didn’t grasp what she was told. When Payne announced they now had two bald raccoons, she assumed it was just figurative language, forgetting what the man who had dropped them off had said on the phone. Even when the puzzled messenger repeated it twice, there was no reaction.

“I’ve seen raccoons before with very little hair. You know, when they are orphaned, they have a hard time of it, and they can show it,” Swinimer explained.

The lack of response from her leader surprised Payne. These were not normal raccoons, and she knew it, but the question now was whether Swinimer had known it when she agreed to take the pair.

Up to Scratch

The name “raccoon” is thought to come from the Algonquin First Nation. It is an English mispronunciation of their word arukun, meaning “he who scratches with his hands.”

In a matter-of-fact manner, Swinimer made her way to the medical centre to view the newcomers, but she wasn’t there long. A few minutes later she was running back to Payne.

“Nicole, those raccoons are bald!” Swinimer blurted out.

Payne was speechless for a moment, and then replied, “Uh, isn’t that what I told you? Three times?”

There was another pause, broken by Swinimer, whom Payne could see was still in disbelief.

“But Nicole, those raccoons have no hair!” she said.

“I know, Hope. That’s why I told you they were bald,” responded Payne.

Swinimer at last understood the difference between what she expected and what had actually arrived.

“I thought you meant they had a bald spot or something!” she sighed.

More than 150 raccoons died of panleukopenia that summer at Hope for Wildlife, and newcomers like Lucifer and his brother were kept isolated and away from the tragedy underway in the main pens. They did not have the virus when they arrived and never got it. However, while Lucifer thrived, put on weight, got into trouble every moment he could, and remained a nasty character, his brother turned out to have other serious health problems and died in a matter of weeks. Since local veterinarians were as puzzled as the rehab workers about the baldness, the dead raccoon was sent away for a professional necropsy. While they waited for the test results, the daily parade past Lucifer’s cage continued. Everyone agreed there wasn’t a new hair showing anywhere.

When the report came back, it was a huge disappointment. No reason was found for the raccoon’s failure to grow fur, leading a sarcastic Payne to summarize it as “Congratulations, you’ve got a bald raccoon!” They had hoped for an answer that would help them understand Lucifer, but this did nothing for them, as Hope for Wildlife had no previous experience with bald mammals. There had been a bald crow named Rudy who finally grew feathers after nine months, so he became the standard Lucifer was judged by.

Raccoon kits feeding. For some reason, racoons have proved the most difficult species to wean.

“I guess my brain was thinking that it happened with Rudy, so it would happen to Lucifer, but so far there is nothing, not even a little bit. We used to stand there, stare at him, and ask each other if we thought he was growing fur. But he wasn’t growing anything. He’s still not,” said Swinimer later as Lucifer entered his second year as her guest. “Until you actually see him, you can’t comprehend how ridiculous he looks. He’s ugly, a pretty sad looking character.”

Very young raccoons need to be tube fed, but getting food into Lucifer was not easy. Staff member Hayley Inkpen said his personality and lack of hair both contributed.

“He was a terror to feed. He was squirmy and would give the worst bites, and it was hard because he had no fur, so there was nothing to really hold him by,” Inkpen said. “The amount of times he got away from me, jumped to the floor, and ran would be too many to count.”

Partially or totally bald raccoons were rare, but had been recorded before, and was usually attributed to mange, a common condition that causes fur loss in animals. However, this was not the case with Lucifer, nor with some of the totally hairless raccoons found occasionally in the southern United States, where the climate gave them a better chance for survival.

Biologists studied those southern cases carefully and classified raccoons lacking fur but not having mange as “anomalies,” things that didn’t fit normal classification. Their work was made urgent by a new and rapidly spreading Latin American myth. Since the 1990s, there had been a wave of stories, at first oral but then picked up by news media, about “el chupacabara,” a hairless night monster that sucked blood from farm animals. The myth was first heard in Puerto Rico in 1995, and in fifteen years had spread as far south as Chile and north to Maine. Even though several so-called chupacabara sightings in Texas turned out to be either mangy foxes or hairless raccoon anomalies, the belief continued to be so widespread that in some rural regions, even partially naked animals like Lucifer were looked askance at and killed. Payne had never heard of chupacabaras when she gave him his name. He was simply an evil little raccoon. To many other workers, he was also “Bald Ugly Guy.”

The real demon in the summer of 2009 was the virus. Lucifer was safe in isolation, but in the main raccoon pens, the disease ravaged the young and the weak, leaving dead raccoons and exhausted, sobbing young women in its wake. Hope for Wildlife had 350 raccoons that year, a record number, and when panleukopenia struck, experts told them to expect a mortality rate of eighty to ninety per cent. The disease is different from distemper, for which it is often mistaken. Distemper is a slow, painful killer. Panleukopenia is quick and very deadly. With distemper, wild animals come out of the woods to wander aimlessly on roads and near people’s homes. It is a disease the public can see. With panleukopenia, there is nothing to see.

“Wildlife doesn’t even make it to people’s yards, so the public never knows it’s there,” Swinimer said. “It’s so quick, twenty-four to forty-eight hours at the most. We’d be feeding them one minute, an hour later they’d be dead. It was so sad. Some days, there would be garbage bags of them. In the end, we probably released as many as we ever did, but only because we started with such a large number.”

Once Hope for Wildlife knew what the disease was, they researched, got advice, and put in place a stringent battle plan that required cooperation from the entire volunteer staff. Vaccinations were started immediately. Separation and isolation without interfering with the rest of the wildlife guests used up every inch of available space. Staff used footbaths when entering or leaving infected areas. Clothing could not be worn from one unit to another. Making the sanitation rules even more urgent was Swinimer’s discovery that raccoons weren’t the only animals at risk. Mustelids, including all members of the weasel family, were also vulnerable. In particular, Swinimer was concerned for the aging pine marten that had for so long been the symbol of Hope for Wildlife’s spirit and principles.

“I was really worried about Gretel. I was just panicking,” she said. “Any skunks, anything in the weasel family could have caught it.”

Working amid the diarrhetic, vomiting, and dying raccoons was not an easy thing for trained professionals, but Swinimer’s staff included many young women of high school and college age. One of them was Meredith Brison-Brown, a Dalhousie University student who joined Hope for Wildlife in July and stepped into the tail end of the nightmare. She said the smell of the disease was horrible and constant, and when it came from an animal, death would be right behind.

“There was a foul, bitter odour to it. You couldn’t avoid it. The animals’ stool would go completely white and they’d lose control of their bowels, then their mouths would dry up. It happened so quickly. They’d be fine one minute, then they’d be gone.”

One of the things she noticed was the support the staff members gave each other. She came in just as the outbreak had begun to wane and spent most of her time in the bird room, freeing up senior workers for the raccoons, but Brison-Brown saw what was happening with veteran staff members.

Medical experts couldn’t explain Lucifer’s lack of body fur. He was simply bald, bad tempered, and knew how to cause problems at Hope for Wildlife.

“Many people were having a really hard time of it,” she said. “There was a lot of crying, a lot of hugging going on, and people supporting each other.”

Swinimer echoed Brison-Brown. The staff members, she said, were troopers.

“You have to remember, we have young people who have never been exposed to something like this. They were amazing. They pulled it all together,” she said. “There were tough times and there were tearful times, but through it all, no one quit and no one gave up.”

This support and teamwork allowed them to beat the odds. Statistics said Hope for Wildlife would lose between eighty and ninety per cent of their animals, or about three hundred out of three hundred and fifty. Instead, the staff kept the death rate down to fifty per cent, not only saving half of all their raccoons, but also keeping the virus from spreading to any other species. By late July, it was over and all the animals held in isolation, including Lucifer, were moved back to the main nurseries.

Now that he didn’t have to share the spotlight, Lucifer’s personality and talent for trouble started to blossom. He easily remained the most bad-tempered raccoon of the year but also began to display his loathing for keepers and their rules through a highly developed sense of the dramatic.

Playful first-year raccoons. There was little play in 2009 when a deadly virus killed half of that year’s number at Hope for Wildlife.

“Any time I went near the cage, he would hiss and growl,” said Brison-Brown. “Then he would slowly go to the back of his cage and all of a sudden charge the front.”

“He made a lot of us really nervous,” added volunteer Sabrina Horne.

“Since he was the nastiest raccoon we had, it was naturally Lucifer who figured out how to make our lives even worse by learning how to unlock his cage door,” commented Payne.

If there was one animal in the mammal nursery workers didn’t enjoy searching for, it was Lucifer, but Payne was right about his abilities and he quickly became an escape artist of renown. The complicating factor was that after he had trashed whatever he could get his paws on, all he wanted was a nice, warm, dark place to snuggle his furless body into. This, combined with his reputation, made for some very hesitant searchers.

“We’d look everywhere for him, all the while slightly nervous he was going to jump out into our faces as we peered under things,” Horne admitted.

Tiffany Sullivan remembers one of those incidents. She and Horne had come in early and found the mammal room door properly closed, but Lucifer’s cage empty. A cursive search found nothing, and there was no particular mess to show he had been roaming at night, so Sullivan checked the logbook to see if he had died. There was no entry, but given the evidence and the events of that summer, they assumed he had and went about their work. Hours later, as their shift was ending, Sullivan climbed a stool to put some freshly washed towels on a top shelf. Some of the ones already there looked a bit dishevelled, so she started to reorganize them and came face to face with her “dead” raccoon, contentedly asleep at the bottom of the pile.

“There he was! It scared me so badly, I screamed and jumped backwards off the stool I was standing on,” admitted Sullivan.

This and several similar incidents turned out to be only warm-ups for the main event. One morning, arriving workers found all the squirrels out of their cages and clinging in terror to the inside of the nursery’s screen door. Some thought it was cute, others funny. Then they went inside. What faced them was total destruction. Lucifer had not only set himself free, he had also managed to open every other raccoon’s cage.

The raccoons had knocked over the squirrel and chipmunk cages, freeing them and breaking all the dishes in the process. Every shelf and counter had been ransacked and something like a tornado had swept through the towel case, tossing at random every towel and rag. Lucifer and friends had also territorially urine-marked everything they touched, and according to Brison-Brown, “poop was everywhere.” The mayhem had a strange familiarity to it, she said. Unrolled streamers of paper towels were strewn about, cages were overturned, dishes smashed, and animals on the loose.

On the Move

Once solely a North American animal, the highly adaptable raccoon is now found throughout Europe and in Japan. Escape and deliberate releases in the twentieth century account for this spreading, but not its massive success. The raccoon is an animal originally of the hardwood forests, but has shown itself completely comfortable in marshes, mountains, farmlands, and especially cities.

“It was as if a college party had taken place in there!” she said.

There were no raccoons in sight until someone checked the row of boxes atop their cages. Each one held a sleeping raccoon. Lucifer was curled up in a box containing stuffed toy animals. It took almost two hours to re-cage everyone, clean up the mess, and locate a missing chipmunk which was finally discovered hiding inside the back of a refrigerator. Locks were placed on all the raccoon cages within days.

Lucifer had not only been in isolation because of the virus. There had also been the question of whether his hairlessness could spread to others, so he was without animal friends for a considerable period. Gradually, workers started to feel pity for him. Hayley Inkpen was one of them.

“He stayed by himself for a long time. I eventually started feeling bad for him because the other raccoons had friends to play with, and all he had was a stuffed toy,” she said.

“I don’t know how or why Lucifer started to become less angry and less of a brat, but I began to notice that he’d come to the front of his cage if I walked by and would look out at me,” Inkpen continued. “I started to be able to pet his paws and face through the bars. Next, I opened up the cage, and although it took a few minutes of standing with my hand out, waiting, Lucifer would eventually come up and allow me to pet him. It even got to the point that with much patience, I was able to pick him up a few times without getting bitten or clawed. It was around this time that Lucifer began to gain everyone’s sympathy and was given a proper name that sounds much better than Ugly Naked Guy.”

About this time, he was reintroduced to other raccoons, but that revealed another problem. Lucifer had forgotten how to get along with peers, and would annoy them constantly, demanding to play when all they wanted to do was curl up and sleep. It was obvious to humans that he was looking for attention, but to his own kind, he was the annoying new kid with no social skills. Eventually he settled in, but not without some tense moments.

Hope for Wildlife’s staff gradually became accustomed to Lucifer. His temperament grew better with time and their fear of him waned, but his missing coat stubbornly refused to grow. That constituted a major problem because the purpose of bringing in orphan raccoons each spring was not to keep them as pets; it was to care for them until they could take care of themselves. Each was given the best possible introduction and experience learning to catch food and live as a regular animal that could be placed back into the wild. Lucifer was quick to pick up skills, and based on that should have been ready for autumn release with the rest of his peers, but Swinimer and her crew knew it was not going to happen. No one was going to put a coatless raccoon outdoors for the winter. Until he grew fur, he was theirs, no matter how cantankerous he got.

Every year at the rehabilitation centre, there were a few young raccoons born too late for autumn release. They had to be overwintered, which meant Lucifer would not be alone. Raccoons do not hibernate, but grow a heavy coat and sleep most of the time, sometimes in a deep torpor similar to a bear’s. They occasionally eat and come out of their den to look around, even hunt if they are in the wild. Swinimer was very worried about how Lucifer would take the cold weather, but when it came, it appeared to have no effect on him. He didn’t have fur, but the rest of the raccoons he was with did, and when they all piled into an insulated nesting box, he seemed comfortable.

Lucifer in all his nakedness.

“Lucifer lived surrounded by their fur to keep him warm,” said Swinimer. “I was really worried, but he did fine. You’d see him out running around on the coldest days. He didn’t seem to be bothered by it. His skin is like leather.”

By the time his second spring came, Hope for Wildlife faced a decision. It was starting to look as if this raccoon was never going to grow more hair than he arrived with, which meant he was no longer a rehabilitation case. Now they had to decide if Lucifer had enough attributes to merit keeping him as an education animal. Certainly his looks and disposition ruled out work with school children, or even adults. About the only two things he did well were getting along with other raccoons and eating. Swinimer took a hard look and came up with an idea. If he was too feisty and ugly for people, why not let him educate other raccoons?

“He’s going to serve a purpose, and we’re going to keep him until he sprouts fur or forever, whichever comes first,” she announced. “Every year, we have a terrible time teaching our young raccoons how to eat on their own. It’s horrid. I don’t know why raccoons are so hard to wean. It’s like they know how to suckle, but they don’t know how to go to the next stage and start chewing. With an adult to teach them and show them through example, it might speed up the process. That would really help us with our workload.”

It would also give a bald and occasionally bad-tempered raccoon a place to live and people to take care of him. Perhaps it did not make him any less troublesome to humans, but whether showing raccoon pups how to catch their first minnow in a plastic wading pool or munch down on a tasty June bug, at least now he had a purpose and a home.